As faithful Tone Deaf readers will know, Australian rockers Kingswood were recently thrust into the headlines after a Fairfax journalist accused them of not paying their dues because they accepted money to perform a cover for a car ad.
Hitting back at the journalist, Kingswood guitarist Alexander Laska was forced to explain the reality of being an artist in 2015 – just because you pay your dues doesn’t mean you’re going to get paid back to do it.
Our readers and Kingswood’s fans were firmly on the side of the band, understanding that in this day and age of next-to-nil royalties, longevity will sometimes mean dealing with corporate players and that “selling out” has taken on a new, more nuanced meaning.
It’s a fascinating if contentious topic and one we discussed with none other than Regurgitator’s Quan Yeomans, who shared the insights and experiences he’s gathered over 20 years in the Australian music industry.
Regurgitator are currently gearing up to hit the road on a national tour to celebrate the release of Nothing Less than Cheap Imitations: Live at The HiFi Melbourne Oct 2012, their very first live album, which is available from Friday, 4th September.
Tone Deaf: You guys recently put out a live album, Nothing Less than Cheap Imitations. How did you come to that decision? Why now?
Quan Yeomans: Because we hadn’t had one before and that was basically the decision, I think. We also had some desk tapes from a couple of tours ago and they were terrible from what we could understand listening to them.
We thought, well, we could do overdubs and make them sound pretty, like a normal band would do. But we just thought fuck it, it is what it is. It’s raw and it’s live and it’s how bad we actually sound.
TD: Can you tell us a bit about the workflow behind the album? The shows were recorded in 2012, how did you cull through the tracks you had, what kind of choices went into how they were produced and mastered, etc?
QY: Basically, they were sent to us by our sound guy, Greg, who had done the recordings or facilitated them somehow and got his mitts on them. And our manager, Paul, had kind of said to go for it and try to make the best we can out of it.
I tried to listen to them once or twice through and there were a couple bits that were just unusable and some bits I had to let go because there were no other versions. I don’t think Ben even listened to them, he was just too embarrassed.
TD: We remember you once said that when you listen to ‘Polyester Girl’ these days, you can’t believe how crap it sounds. Was that because of the production or the song itself?
QY: A bit of both, I guess you could say. Well, you can really hear that it’s just done on one of those TR-303s or whatever it was at the time, one of the first groove boxes that came out.
Not to say that that isn’t… I mean, one of my favourite records, that first Peaches record, was done with just that and her vocals and it sounds awesome. So I mean, really I think the intent behind the song is good, so that’s part of the reason why it was successful.
But obviously the other reason is… later on, after listening to it for a while and not realising where I’d actually scalped it from, I realised that it was exactly the same as that song in Big, ‘Heart & Soul’, except it’s not swung.
Obviously, pop music is like that, you find references you’re not quite sure about or other people aren’t sure about, they know they’ve heard it somewhere before, they know the chord progression, and that’s the way pop music progresses and recycles itself and goes on and on forever.
TD: Doing a live album is sometimes viewed as a cheap cash ploy from some bands. Was that a consideration for the band? How did you make sure it was a quality product?
QY: We didn’t. I don’t really know what a quality product is anymore. I mean, a quality product is really a matter of opinion, right? I mean, you work for Tone Deaf, you know that’s the case.
Obviously, you’ve worked in music media for I don’t know how many years, but you know that everything’s just a matter of opinion – your review, your understanding of it. So, we just released it because we hadn’t done it before.
We view ourselves as a reasonably okay live act. We’re entertaining at the time. When you listen to it on tape, there’s a lot of alcohol vibe going on there, polishing it up, which I think is interesting in and of itself and a lot of bands would not let what we released go out there, I don’t think.
But we’re not that kind of band, we like the fact that there’s a lot of things you’re not aware of, these kind of subtexts and sub-vibe things going on in clubs. There’s a really great bootleg of Prince where he says something about the audience being drunk and making up the music in their minds as they go along.
Obviously he’s a master at everything, he sounds amazing, half of Purple Rain was recorded live. So it doesn’t really apply to him, but it certainly applies to us and I think it’s nice to know what the reality is in a way.
TD: You guys have been around for ever. To what do you attribute that and is it possible for today’s bands to do the same thing or have they just missed the boat?
QY: The industry has changed a lot. The way that record companies used to control their bands and in a way nurture them over a five album or six album, sometimes longer, career has certainly changed.
A lot of the emphasis is now on whatever’s new. There’s so much out there, so much talent, and there’s so many different ways of getting it down on record now compared to having to pay a thousand dollars a day for a studio.
So there’s just a glut of great music out there now and it’s really easy to be a flash in the pan, a really bright flash in the pan and there’s some incredible quality coming out, but I think it’s harder maybe in a company sense to take that long player view.
TD: Do you ever think that if you had Ableton whilst you were making Unit that things would’ve been easier and cheaper?
QY: Well, back in the day we were using someone else’s money. There’s definitely people who still do it in a similar kind of way, but the media and the way it’s promoted is completely different now.
But I think there are still bands out there with longevity. There’s definitely people out there that you just can’t stop their talent. I mean, the guy behind Tame Impala is obviously, he’s a genius, he’s addicted to what he does, he has a brilliant production ear, he will go on and on and on.
There’s no stopping that, regardless of what the media is like or what the technology is like. Some people just love doing it and are really fucking great at it and they will float to the top at some point.
TD: We’ll actually get to Tame Impala in a second, but Regurg have previously declined offers for your music to be used in ads, including by huge companies like Coke. What’s the rationale behind that?
QY: We didn’t need the money at the time. I mean, there’s a certain point in your career where you go, ‘I’m making a lot of money, I don’t need to take any more from these people.’
When you start taking money from them, you obviously are connected to that brand and their philosophy and their ideals, we sort of avoided that for as long as we could. But we make a lot less money now.
After signing the publishing deal with EMI, I took quite a bit of money from those guys and basically left it in their hands to work out a way of getting it back to themselves.
It’s essentially a bank loan, they have to recoup it however they can and you get final veto on where it goes, but if you want to recoup and you don’t want a debt hanging over your head, you generally accept more than you would before. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything I was completely against.
But unfortunately when you want to make a living and have a sustained income doing this sort of thing, you have to make decisions at certain points. Things in your life change, I have a family now, a young child, so my ideals are somewhat different to when I started out.
TD: You guys have always been pretty passionate about the concept of selling out. The opening track on your very first album was called ‘I Sucked a Lot of Cock to Get Where I Am’. What do you define as selling out? Is there such a thing in 2015?
QY: I don’t know, I really don’t know, I don’t know what it means to kids anymore. In a way, it’s sort of a marketing tool, as well, this idea of selling out and which side of the fence are you on. How do you actually market that to people?
If that’s what it’s really about then what relevance does it have on the bottom line? I don’t know how relevant it is now, because music is essentially free if you want it to be. It does depends on how you want to be perceived, as well.
I lived in Hong Kong for a long time and I had trouble finding things that weren’t connected to corporations – art projects, music projects. There was a huge corporate tie-in thing and it’s an Asian thing and it was natural for artists to just accept that.
I found it really odd that people didn’t make art for art’s sake, but it’s incredibly difficult to survive in an economy like Hong Kong as just a pure artist. You are literally surround by bankers and surrounded by corporate people.
So that becomes part of the natural way of integrating art into life, in a way. It’s very different to where I came from in the ’90s in Australia where if you were connected to a brand, then you weren’t really true to your artistic voice or your integrity or whatever…
TD: Did you believe that?
QY: I definitely believed that, for sure, to an extent. I don’t want to be the banner for something I don’t agree with and even if I was destitute and that was the only make money, it would be a hard thing for me to actually say yes to.
I think the thing that really pushes people into those positions is greed and if you feel like you could never have enough or you want more, then you’re going to put yourself in those positions where the only way to get that kind of dollar is to really hop into bed with people with insane amounts of money and usually those are corporate people.
TD: It’s interesting you mentioned Kevin Parker from Tame Impala, because he recently said the majority of the money he’s made from his actual recordings came from selling it to advertisers and he’s made next to nothing from record sales.
QY: Sure, I’m not surprised, because how do you sell records in today’s market? There’s virtually no way of doing it, it’s very, very difficult, especially for a niche sound like his.
I mean, I’m sure pop stars still sell singles and get their billions of YouTube plays, but it is very difficult, I think the pyramid has gotten higher and higher. It’s very difficult to make huge amounts of money these days, certainly from record sales, it’s almost impossible.
TD: How has the Aussie music industry changed in your view since you guys put out Tu-Plang?
QY: Uh, the internet [laughs] It’s really funny, I think it took Warner Music Australia up until, like, 2012 or something to get a digital arm. They didn’t even think the internet was going to make a difference, for years and years, it’s ridiculous.
It changed everything, as far as I’m concerned. And just back to that Tame Impala thing for a moment, if you can spot a way that his ties to corporations is influencing the sound of his records then I think you can say he sold out to himself to a certain degree.
But if his art is true to itself and still has authenticity, which is fairly easy to spot though of course it’s a matter of opinion, then in my opinion he hasn’t sold out regardless of how much money he’s made selling publishing rights to Blackberry or whoever.
Regurgitator are currently gearing up to hit the road on a national tour to celebrate the release of Nothing Less than Cheap Imitations: Live at The HiFi Melbourne Oct 2012, their very first live album, which is available from Friday, 4th September.
